Don’t Network. The Avant Garde after Networks

Marc James Léger

Explores the nature of avant garde art within contemporary capitalism

There is something rotten about network society. Although the information economy promises to create new forms of wealth and social cooperation, the real subsumption of labour under post-Fordism has instead produced a social factory of precarious labour and cybernetic surveillance. In this context people have turned to networks as an ersatz solution to social problems. Networks become the agent of history, a technological determinism that in the best-case scenario leads to post-capitalism but at worst leads to new forms of exploitation and inequality. Don’t Network proposes a third option to technocratic biocapitalism and social movement horizontalism, an analysis of the ways in which vanguard politics and avant-garde aesthetics can today challenge the ideologies of the network society. 

“The Hacienda has been built, but as a network economy that turns everyone into cannibalistic creatives that devour themselves and the planet satisfying the insatiable demands of the market. Don’t Network offers a lucid analysis of the new class war going on in contemporary art and politics.” – Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, author of After the Great Refusal

“Don’t Network presents a compelling argument that outlines and undermines the hold of contemporary positivisms in politics, aesthetics and the social sciences. The book develops Lacanian schemas of incompleteness and Marxist dialectics to advance negation, rather than connectivity, as the core of any potential cultural avant garde, and as part of a manifest vision for radical movements beyond diffuse and atomised moments of resistance.” – Marina Vishmidt, author of Speculation as a Mode of Production

Bio: Marc James Léger is an independent scholar living in Montreal. He is author of Brave New Avant Garde and Drive in Cinema, and editor of two volumes of The Idea of the Avant Garde – And What It Means Today.

360 pages, 6 x 9

US: $27 / UK: £22

ISBN 978-1-57027-339-1

Release to the book trade December 2018

Released by Minor Compositions, Wivenhoe / Brooklyn / Port Watson

Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life.

Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia

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